It has to get worse before it can get better

The yard of our house is, as you know, a work in progress. Right now, we don't have a place to sit outside in the back yard. The patio furniture from the old house is out there on the grass but never in one place for very long because it gets in the way of mowing.

We are putting in a flagstone patio that will be softened with a groundcover of creeping thyme. Right here, where all of this grass is growing.

We outlined the future patio area with an old hose. (Mr. H. keeps all sorts of handy things in the garage!) It's an area of approximately 12 x 16 feet. 

Mr. H. rented a garden tiller from a local home improvement store to churn up the grass. He wanted to loosen everything to depth of 3-4", which would allow us to remove the excess and make room for the base of sand before laying the stone. 

I thought the machine looked like a very angry insect, but it certainly did the job we needed it to do. 

Mr. H. is pleased with the churned up dirt patch!

We then removed the soil and grass from the area. Lucy chose to lounge in the dirt patch rather than selecting a grassy spot in any other part of the entire back yard. Typical diva behavior.

"I like dirt. It helps wipe off all of the clean."

Now we have an area for the future patio! The stones (2.5 tons of irregularly shaped Lannon stone) will be delivered next Friday. I joked that they should deliver it with a care package of heating pads and ibuprofen. After a day like yesterday, it's not really a joke anymore.

We removed a LOT of soil from the future patio area, but we didn't let it go to waste. We used it to raise a low spot in the front yard and did the same for a spot in the back, saving money we would have spent buying topsoil. We'll spread some grass seed along with some Milorganite and those spots will be lush and green in no time at all.

It's supposed to rain today. What is now a patch of dirt will soon be a puddle of mud.

Interesting tidbits:

• Lannon is a real place in Wisconsin! We drove there to visit a quarry and look at stone samples. It's pretty crazy to see all of the quarries in the area using the aerial imagery from Google Maps. Here's one: 

• It is cheaper to use real stone rather than manufactured, which surprised me. Our original plan was to use honeycomb turf pavers and let the grass poke through, but it was way too pricey.
• Sometimes, when my husband says things like, "I think I have figured out our sand situation," I laugh. Then, when the solution to the sand situation ends up being two tons of sand dumped in the driveway, I groan instead.